


sukhin

by toujours_nigel



Category: Ramayana - Valmiki
Genre: Child Marriage, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 11:53:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18659902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: Rama at seventeen is omnipotent and omniscient, her first shelter in any storm.





	sukhin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weaslayyy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weaslayyy/gifts).



Sita is ten when first she meets Shanta, once Princess of Ayodhya and Anga. Shanta is thirty-three, mother to sons older than Sita, Rishyasringa’s conscientious wife, companion to all his asceticism. She moves through the palace like a wave of dissonant noise, hymning while Sita and her sisters dance, while the queens chatter.

“It comes of being a _rishipatni_ and living in a forest,” Rama explains when she asks him. “I would like to live in a forest again, as I did with Guru Visvamitra.”

“I could play with the birds,” Janaki ventures, “and rabbits. Oh, and perhaps deer; the ones in Father’s park were so tame they would come pluck flowers from my hand. Mandavi was afraid of them, but I wasn’t.”

“The deer in the forest will be wild,” Rama says. “Perhaps you could tame them. I wonder whether there are any in Shanta’s hermitage.”

“I would ask, but she is so quiet I do not want to disturb her. Was she always so quiet?” It is a strange thought, when her husband and his brothers are always chasing one another about the palace and racing horses in the grounds and filling the inner courtyard with the clashing of swords. Sita herself is very like her sisters, and Queen Kaikeyi like Prince Yudhajit, who visited when she was a new bride and tossed them up in the air as though they were weightless, and laughed. She is beginning already to forget her own father, but he and her dimly-remembered uncle had been alike as well, in tenor and temper.

“I do not know. She had already been wed when I was born. I think,” he says quietly, “that she was wed so that my father would have sons. She was unhappy when I was young, I once heard her weeping in my mother’s chambers, and Mother Sumitra kept us very busy all day. She had my elder nephew soon afterwards, and in the letter to my mothers she said she was very happy.”

Sita sits beside him, silent and looking out into the mango orchard while bees hum in the _champaka_ trees and Lakshmana’s arrows thwack into the target he has surreptitiously established beside the stables. Rama clasps her hand after a space of ten breaths and even that is not unalloyed happiness. It is a difficult thing at ten to know another’s great sorrow has given life to the sweetest joy in yours.

“I am glad she is happy now,” she says in time.

Rama squeezes her hand tight and then turns her loose, tucking himself into a loose circle with his chin upon his knees and his arms clasped around his legs. “I hope she is, and wasn’t merely lying to reassure our parents.”

“She is married to a great _rishi_ , and she has sons, and she can visit her parents,” reasons Sita, who had been taught that the first two encompassed a woman’s happiness and found herself tearfully longing for the last as her mother’s face faded from memory. “She must be happy.”

“We will visit Mithila in the spring,” Rama declares, and unfolds his limbs to hug his wife as her face turns radiant with joy. “We will stay there until the rains abate and come home with the harvest.”

“Will they let us go?”

“I shall ask Mother Kaikeyi to persuade them. Dear heart, you must know I will give you whatever I can, and I will never send you away like Shanta, or any children we might have.”

“Even if we have only a daughter? What wil you do for heirs?”

“I have three brothers, married to your three sisters. Surely we will have one son among us all,” Rama laughs, “Or do you think we are all eight cursed by the gods?”

“No,” Sita says decidedly, “for you were a blessing to your parents, and I to mine.”


End file.
